Managing Fever From The Perspective Of Understanding Its Role In Toxic Elimination

Trevor Gunn, May 2008

Trevor will be talking at the forthcoming event 'the natural development of health in children' to be held at RISC in Reading on Sunday 30th November 2008, see events for details and booking form.

The issue of appropriate disease management from a holistic perspective requires that we are aware of the nature of disease. So to condense the many years of study and clinical practise to a few lines we shall look at some fundamental principles. Firstly it is important to understand that the human body has a vast array of physiological 'know how' focussed on keeping you alive, symptoms of illness are in fact reactions to life events rather than signs of malfunction.

For example if we look at the issue of toxicity we can see there are various systems of the body that carry out toxic elimination; respiration, perspiration, defecation and urination. However, if the build up of toxins outweighs the elimination, then the body increases its efforts of elimination thereby producing symptoms of disease. At first this may simply be increased physical elimination; coughing, sneezing and nasal elimination of mucus, vomiting and diarrhoea, increased sweating and urination.

If unresolved, the body would utilise the immune cells of our various systems through a coordinated reaction known as the inflammatory response. Significantly these attempts at restoring order to the body are the curative reactions to the problem of toxicity; the reaction (the symptom) is not the problem.

The common pharmaceutical approach however will be to treat the reactions as though they were the problems, you go with 'the problem of vomiting' consequently you are encouraged to suppress those symptoms, whilst ignoring the real issues.

However suppress the fever - using aspirin, for instance - and the disease may last longer as Timothy Doran of John Hopkins University, Baltimore has demonstrated in the case of chickenpox.

Therefore successful treatment would involve techniques to 'help' your response as opposed to 'suppress' your response, in addition to addressing the initial problem. The problem could be an increased intake of toxins, or equally a nutritional deficiency, or even an emotional stress.

For example the anxiety/fear state leads to increases in adrenalin which is a very effective immune suppressor used by the body in times of fear and anxiety, this 'fight or flight' response diverts energy into energetic activity whilst delaying immune issues until the perceived threat has passed.

The many symptoms of the human body are connected and coordinated and can therefore be understood in terms of beneficial and intelligent reactions to the traumatic conditions we are subjected to. Suppress those symptoms and we run the risk of creating deeper and more serious consequences.

The rationale given for suppressing a fever for example is the danger of febrile convulsions, however there are no known lasting consequences to febrile convulsions it is not the fever response that creates problems but the underlying disease. This unfounded fear of fever has even been give the term fever phobia 'Fever Phobia' used by Dr Barton Schmitt, MD, back in 1980 to describe the numerous misconceptions that many parents and health professionals (including doctors) had, about fever.

Twenty years later as reported in the journal 'Paediatrics' a similar study demonstrated that fever phobia still exists and recommends further studies to evaluate how to re-educate the public and health professionals.

It is in fact known that unless there is a hypothalamic disorder where the body temperature cannot be regulated, the fever will not be allowed to reach a temperature that is damaging to the human body, basically we do not boil ourselves and the febrile convulsions have no lasting impact on the brain or nervous system, a medical confirmation of this can be found in the British Medical Journal 314. 7th June 1997 page 1692:

The fever is indicative of a reaction and therefore indicative of a problem, just as your child crying is symptomatic of a problem, the tears are not the problem. Note that the nature of most holistic therapies, homeopathy included, even when treating symptoms do not suppress.

For more information on publications by Trevor contact The Informed Parent at www.informedparent.co.uk and check out the booklet Vaccination versus Natural Immunity by Trevor Gunn, this excellent booklet has been reviewed on this site book review section and is a good introduction to the mythology of vaccination.